Thursday, May 01, 2008

MMMMMMMM1.

In 1978 Lamborghini and BMW joined forces to launch the first official BMW Motorsport car to the public, it was simply called the M1. Since then the Motorsport division of BMW has cranked out super cars in the form of sport sedans, wagons, coupes and convertibles. To honor the first M car’s 30th anniversary, BMW has just released official photos of a new concept car that’s being called the M1 Homage.

The original M1 was an extreme design in it’s own right and the M1 Homage is no different. In fact, I’d say extreme is a mild adjective when it comes to this particular concept. You can definitely tell that BMW purposefully departed from their design language to pull this one off. I guess that’s okay once in a while. It seems to me that the design is both figuratively and literally blurring the lines of the original M1, as though some strange wormhole brought it to this day and age. Everything from the C pillar on seems like it’s been stretched out by a wrinkle in time. There’s no doubt that it’s sexy and cool, but something about it seems very un-Bimmerish to me.

Personally, I believe the real reincarnation of the original M1 came not too long ago in the form of the BMW 1-Series Coupe tii Concept. Based loosely on the 1970’s fuel-injected 2002 tii, the only reason the Motorsport-built 1-Series Coupe tii Concept isn’t being called the M1 is because of the fancy red time machine pictured above. Word on the street is that the tii is actually getting prepped for production. It’ll be interesting to see how many 1-Series enthusiasts actually swap their tii emblem for one alluding a bit more to the MMMMMMMMuscle found under the hood.